Total Expansion Of The Letter

Download or read book Understanding the Alef-Beis written by Dovid Leitner and published by Feldheim Publishers. This book was released on 2007 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Total Expansion of the Letter written by Trevor Stark and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2020-06-02 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How cubism and Dada radically reimagined the social nature of language, following the utopian poetic vision of Stéphane Mallarmé. At the outset of the twentieth century, language became a visual medium and a philosophical problem for European avant-garde artists. In Total Expansion of the Letter, art historian Trevor Stark offers a provocative history of this “linguistic turn,” centered on the radical doubt about the social function of language that defined the avant-garde movements. Major cubists and Dadaists—including Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, and Tristan Tzara—appropriated bureaucratic paperwork, newspapers, popular songs, and advertisements, only to render them dysfunctional and incommunicative. In doing so, Stark argues, these figures contended with the utopian vision of the late nineteenth-century poet Stéphane Mallarmé, who promised a “total expansion of the letter.” In his poems, Mallarmé claimed, “the act of writing was scrutinized down to its origins.” This scrutiny, however, delivered his work into an indeterminate zone between mediums, social practices, and temporalities—a paradox that reverberates through Stark's wide-ranging case studies in the history of the avant-garde. Stark examines Picasso's nearly abstract works of 1910, which promised to unite painting and writing at the brink of illegibility; the cubists' “hope of an anonymous art,” expressed in newspaper collages and industrial colors; the collaborative, cacophonous invention of “simultaneous poems” by the Dadaists in Zurich during World War I; and Duchamp's artistic exploration of chance in gambling and finance. Each of these cases reflected the avant-garde's transformative encounter with the premise of Mallarmé's poetics: that language—the very medium of human communication and community—is perpetually in flux and haunted by emptiness.

Download or read book Maurice Blanchot written by Gerald L. Bruns and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2005-04-13 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ch. 9 (pp. 207-234), "Blanchot's 'holocaust'", discusses the French thinker's philosophy of the Holocaust.

Download or read book A Long Essay on the Long Poem written by Rachel Blau DuPlessis and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2023-03-21 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In A Long Essay on the Long Poem, DuPlessis invokes a quote from Ronald Johnson: "Americans like to write big poems, even if people don't read them." It's a joke, in part, but also a telling indication of the difficulty of the subject. Long poems are elusive, particularly in the slippery forms that have emerged in the postmodern mode. DuPlessis quotes both Nathaniel Mackey and Anne Waldman in metaphorizing the poem as a Box: both in the sense of a vessel that contains, and as a machine that processes, an instrument on which language is played. To reckon with a particularly noncompliant variant of a notoriously slippery form, DuPlessis works in a polyvalent mode, a hybrid of critical analysis and speculative essay. She resists a single-focus approach to the long poem and does not venture a bravura, one-size-all thesis. Yet there is an arc of argument here, even as the book ranges across five chapters and a host of disparate writers. DuPlessis roughly divides the long poem and the long poets into three genres: epics, quests, and something she terms "assemblages." The poets surveyed will be familiar for most readers of twentieth-century American and English poetry: T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Louis Zukofsky, Charles Olson, Alice Notley, Anne Waldman, Nathaniel Mackey, Ron Silliman, and Robert Duncan. But rather than attempting a definitive treatment of such a long roster, DuPlessis assumes a certain familiarity in order to focus on key works. A standout example comes in the third chapter, in which DuPlessis reads Dante by way of the modern long poem to generate surprising insights. But she also carefully avoids the self-confirming search for genealogical patterns (e.g., Eliot to Pound to Williams to Zukofsky). Instead she deliberately seeks to see different but intersecting patterns of connection between poems, a nexus rather than a lineage. In doing so she works around the metatextual challenge of the long poem and of her own attempt to "essay" it: how to encompass "everything." The end result is a fascinating and generous work that defies neat categorization as anything other than essential"--

Download or read book Historical Modernisms written by Jean-Michel Rabaté and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-10-21 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining the ways in which modernism is created within specific historical contexts, as well as how it redefines the concept of history itself, this book sheds new light on the historical-mindedness of modernism and the artistic avant-gardes. Cutting across Anglophone and less explored European traditions and featuring work from a variety of eminent scholars, it deals with issues as diverse as artistic medium, modernist print culture, autobiography as history writing, avant-garde experimentations and modernism's futurity. Contributors examine both literary and artistic modernism, combining theoretical overviews and archival research with case studies of Anglophone as well as European modernism, which speak to the current historicizing trend in modernist and literary studies.

Download or read book The Divine Vision of Dante's Paradiso written by William Franke and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-19 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A bold study that reveals Dante's medieval vision of Scripture as theophany through pioneering use of contemporary theory and phenomenology.

Download or read book Redeeming Words and the Promise of Happiness written by David Kleinberg-Levin and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2012-08-31 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book boldly ventures to cross some traditional academic boundaries, offering an original, philosophically informed argument regarding the nature of language by reading and interpreting the poetry of Wallace Stevens and the novels of Vladimir Nabokov. So it is a work both in literary criticism and in philosophy. The approach is strongly influenced by Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of language and Theodor Adorno’s aesthetic theory, but the philosophical thought of other philosophers—notably Plato, Kant, Hegel, Emerson, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein—figures significantly in the reading and interpretation. The essence of the argument is that, despite its damaged condition (standardization, commodification, staleness), language is, as such, by virtue of its very existence, the bearer of a utopian or messianic promise of happiness. Moreover, it is argued that, by reconciling the two senses of sense (sensuous sense and intelligible sense), showing the sheer power of words to create fictional worlds and destroy what they have just created, and redeeming the revelatory power of words—above all, the power to turn the familiar into something no longer familiar, something astonishing or perplexing—the two writers in this study sustain our hope for a world of reconciled antagonisms and contradictions, evoking in the way they freely play with the sounds and meanings of words, some intimations of a world—our world here, this very world, not some heavenly world—in which the promise of happiness would be fulfilled and redeemed. In the first part of the book, reflecting on the poetry of Stevens, Kleinberg-Levin argues that the poet defies the correspondence theory of truth to enable words to be faithful to truth as transformative and revelatory—what Heidegger calls “unconcealment”, translating the Greek. He also argues that in the pleasure we get from the sensuous play of words, there is an anticipation of the promise of happiness that challenges the theological doctrine of an otherworldly happiness and makes the religious experience seem like a paltry substitute. In the second part of the book, Kleinberg-Levin shows how Nabokov inherits Mallarmé’s conception of literature, causing with his word-plays the sudden reduction of the fictional world he has just so compellingly created to its necessary conditions of materiality: white paper, ink, print on the page. We thus see the novel as a work of fiction, as mere semblance; we see its conditions of possibility, created and destroyed before our very eyes. But the pleasure in seeing words doing this, and the pleasure in their sensuous materiality, are intimations of the promise of happiness that language bears. Using a Kantian definition of modernism, according to which a work is modernist if it reveals and questions the inherited assumptions about its necessary conditions of possibility, these studies show how and why both Stevens and Nabokov are exemplars of literary modernism.